The Rites and Wrongs of Janice Wills (11 page)

Paul and I got into his car, and he drove us to uptown Melva. It was a sunny afternoon, and the neatly trimmed grass around the court square was a perfect, even green. The old buildings surrounding the square looked, well, I had to admit it: charming. We parked and got out.

“Wanna just wander around some?” Paul asked.

“Sure.” I nodded. Ordinarily I would have pointed out that the verb “wander” implied one was in a place in which one was capable of aimlessness, of getting lost, of discovering something — a place completely unlike the short, straight, overly familiar lines of uptown Melva — but I didn’t say that. With Paul, there
was
a feeling that we might actually be able to discover something strange and serendipitous through aimlessness, even there in that utterly familiar court square.

We happened to pass my neighbor, Mrs. Crandor, walking her poodle. Paul greeted her and she beamed at us. “Aren’t y’all cute! And what a gorgeous day!” she chirped before toddling past us, following her little dog.

“Wow,” I said to Paul. “Mrs. Crandor must really like you. She’s never that nice.”

“What are you talking about? She’s
always
that nice. Haven’t you ever talked to her?”

I thought about it for a minute. Had I ever talked to Mrs. Crandor? She was my nosy neighbor. I’d waved at her enough times — it seemed like I must’ve talked to her….

“No,” I admitted. “Weird. I guess I really haven’t talked to her. I just thought because her face
looks
mean …”

Paul smiled. “Her face looks
old
, not mean. There’s a difference.”

I flushed. Paul probably thought I was hypercritical still. This whole outing was a terrible idea. I took a deep breath and focused on walking like a young woman, not a scarecrow.

“Hey,” Paul said quickly. “Have you heard about the Palabadu people? In Micronesia?”

I frowned, racking my brain. Had I? The name sounded vaguely familiar. I’d read some articles about people in Micronesia, but I couldn’t pull up the Palabadu.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Are you finally interested in anthropology too?”

“Well, I was just flipping through an old
National Geographic
, and I happened on this article. The Palabadu have an elaborate ritual when they believe they’ve accidentally hurt or offended another person. They collect a series of special leaves — these large, waxy leaves that grow in the jungle. They use these leaves as plates. Then they prepare this huge feast for the person they’ve
hurt. When the feast is
ready, they
summon the person and sit the person in a special throne made entirely out of conch shells.”

“Maybe I’ve heard of this,” I said. “Palabadu. It’s sounding vaguely familiar.”

“And the most treasured food of the Palabadu is ice cream. It’s a luxury because very few people own freezers, and of course they live in a warm environment. So they prepare this huge goblet of treasured ice cream with caramel sauce for the person they feel they’ve wronged, and they also offer her a handmade ceremonial garment made entirely of butterfly wings —”

“You’re kidding me,” I said. “No freezers but they love ice cream? Butterfly wings? What issue was this?”

Paul grinned at me. He shrugged.

“Seriously, Paul? Where’d you hear this stuff?”

“Fine,” he said. “You figured me out. I made it all up. No Palabadu. But it sure sounds like a nice culture, right? And what I’m trying to tell you is … I think I owe you ice cream.”

I smacked his arm lightly. “You liar! And of course here I am telling you that the Palabadu sound familiar.” I laughed, shaking my head.

So Paul and I walked down the street and around the corner to the Melva Ice-Cream Shop. The ice-cream shop was a popular afternoon spot mostly for middle schoolers, but sometimes when we got the urge for ice cream, we still went there too. The door jingled as we walked inside.

“Hey, buddy!” Paul called.

Stephen Shepherd was sitting at one of the tables. He put aside a jumble of tiny objects in front of him and looked up happily. His face was muddy with chocolate ice cream.

“Hey, Paul!” Stephen said. He looked at me warily, then back at Paul.

“Looks like you got into a serious battle with that ice cream, but still managed to triumph,” Paul said, laughing. “What have you got there?”

Stephen looked at the jumble in front of him. Tiny gears and cogs and silvery whatnots.

“Model plane parts. Miniature,” he said. “Started working on this sort of thing at MIT this past summer. But I’m building my own design and hoping eventually to translate it to the real deal.”

What was it that was so weird about Stephen? I wondered. And then I realized — he looked perfectly happy. Perfectly happy doing exactly what he liked, even if he looked like a chocolate-covered three-year-old playing with Legos.

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
The sight of an adolescent looking utterly happy is so unusual that it is startling.

“That’s cool, Stephen,” I said. “I had no idea you were so good.” He smiled back at me. A brown-toothed, sticky-faced smile, but a good smile nonetheless.

Paul and I ordered ice cream, and when he was about to pay, Mr. Thompson, the shop owner, stopped him. “Wait. Wait. If I’m not mistaken, you’re buying ice cream for one of our Miss Livermush contenders. Is that correct?” he asked, winking at me.

“Uh, yes. Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll be there next Saturday. Gonna give it my best shot.”

“Well, that’s all anyone can ask, isn’t it? Ice cream’s on the house for both of you. Good luck Saturday!” Mr. Thompson said.

“Wow,” I said as we walked outside to find the benches. “That was so nice of Mr. Thompson. And I didn’t realize Stephen was so smart.”

“Yeah,” Paul said. “He’s pretty brilliant — especially when it comes to mechanical stuff. Aviation. That sort of thing.”

I nodded, licking the side of my ice cream before it could drip. “Yeah, I guess I always only noticed how weird he was.”

Paul grinned at me. “Everybody who’s really into something is weird. You too. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve done in the name of anthropology?”

I thought for a minute. “I used to go to this online anthropology chat room. It was mainly for grad students and professors,” I said. I told Paul a little about it. The discussions were often mundane but occasionally interesting, especially when someone wrote about his fieldwork. At the time, I’d gathered that most of the people I talked to were also eccentrics — odd, bald, lonely but harmless men in Hot Pocket—stained clothes — but I convinced myself that the more unglamorous the person
with whom I was engaged in anthropological conversation (online, at least), the greater the intrinsic intellectual merit. Possibly. Of course, I’d been hoping there might be a devastatingly handsome young anthropologist among them too.

“But then one day AnthropoManiac75 from Indiana told me that we were soul mates and he’d already Googled me and found my family’s address, so I’ve avoided the anthropology chat room ever since,” I said.

Paul guffawed. “Seriously?! And had AnthropoManiac found your address?”

“No, of course not! He was lying. He didn’t even know my real name. I’m not stupid! But probably best not to mention it to my mom,” I said. “She’s watched one too many television news shows on Internet predators.” This was true: My mom seriously viewed the Internet as nothing more than one big child molester hangout buzzing with constant ENLARGE YR PENIS emails and pornography.

I watched Paul slurp his ice cream — there was something cute about it. I looked at his mouth, thinking briefly of Jimmy’s mouth hard against mine. I couldn’t imagine Paul’s mouth doing or saying anything unkind.

“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve done?” I asked Paul.

“My entire life,” he said. “My entire life is composed of weird things I’ve done in the name of some interest or another.”

“And so you struggle to downplay all the weird things you do in order to survive, huh?” I said. “Get by without attracting too much notice?”

Paul tilted his head at me, studying my face. Slowly he began to shake his head.

“No, no, no, Janice,” he said. “I thought you were a better anthropologist than that! You have the entire art of adolescent survival all wrong! You don’t
hide
your weirdnesses. You embrace them, thereby making them
cool
. It becomes your whole appeal, your strategy. And it works every time. It’s basically punk. A punk rock approach to life.”

I looked at Paul for a second before I burst out laughing again. “I hate to break it to you, but you’re soooooo not punk,” I said, still laughing. “You may have figured some things out, but you’re no Joey Ramone.”

Paul shrugged again, smiling.

“It’s like making it to the next video game level when you think you’ve already conquered the game, Janice,” he continued. “You’ve heard of the pink of goth, right? Like, if you’re so goth that the goth-est thing you can do is to ditch the safety pins and rock something pastel pink instead? That’s like me being punk. That’s how punk I am — I’m so punk, I’m the easy listening of punk. I’m totally the Lite FM of punk rock. It’s a full-circle thing, you see?”

“I hear you,” I said, smiling. “And I’m like, the pleated khaki high-waters of cool. The thick lenses and headgear of hip. So utterly, transcendentally cool that the next level upward is basically polka-dot suspenders. It’s a nerd of cool situation.”

Paul laughed. I watched him, his crinkling brown eyes, his straight teeth, his wavy brown hair.
Cute
, the non-anthropologist part of my brain warbled inside my head.
Very cute
.

My cell phone rang.

“Crap,” I said. “It’s my mom. I’ve got to go, but Paul, thank you for the ice cream. And for sharing the wisdom of the Palabadu.”

“No problem,” he said, “and good luck in the pageant. Own it. Nerd of cool, represent. I’ll see you there.”

It was finally Saturday morning, the day of the annual Melva’s Miss Livermush Pageant and Scholarship Competition. I felt like I’d been guzzling energy drinks. I hadn’t, of course — I hadn’t been able to eat or drink anything but water because I was so nervous. My dress was wrapped carefully in plastic. Margo and I walked past the booths and food stands already set up for the Livermush Festival to the registration table.

Standing in line, my arms goose-bumped. Margo shivered beside me.

“I hope it warms up,” I said to the lady at the registration table, looking up at the grayish sky, “and doesn’t start pouring.”

HISTORICAL NOTE:
Once, at the Melva’s Miss Livermush Pageant of 1953, it started pouring. With thunder and lightning. A tree near the stage was struck by lightning and two contestants were injured — only mildly. Still, a rule was
instituted that the pageant be called off at the first sound of thunder.

“Trust me, you’ll be so nervous you won’t notice anything up there,” the registration lady said reassuringly. “It’ll be like this weird dream that’ll be over before you know what happened.”

“Okay,” I said, smiling at her like a mechanical doll.

As we walked away, Margo whispered to me, “That was the least encouraging bit of encouragement I’ve ever heard.”

Margo and I followed the pageant coordinator, Ms. Anne Whitaker, to the greenroom that had been set up in the Arts Council building. All the girls were assigned a chair and a small cubby by the mirrors. We would change and get ready there. Ms. Whitaker explained all this quickly without blinking. She was a news anchor on the local channel’s
Melva Headline News
, a position that hardly seemed like a real job to me but apparently required monstrous amounts of pancake makeup even when not in front of television lights.

The pageant’s theme this year was “Tropical Wonderland!” so there were huge papier-mâché flowers, birds, and butterflies everywhere — on the stage, backstage, and in the greenroom as well. I had to admit that the enormous, multicolored flowers were impressive.

“Who did the decorations?” I asked Ms. Whitaker.

“Oh, a nice young man from Melva High School that we hired — quite a versatile artist. Jimmy Denton? Do you girls
know him? We explained our vision to him, and he gave us this. We couldn’t have been more pleased with the result!” I faced the floor, my cheeks burning.

“All right, girls. Here you go. Blair here is helping us. She’ll direct you and make sure you’re ready for the stage at the appropriate times. She can answer any questions because she went through this experience last year.”

Blair happened to be TR’s older sister, a former Miss Livermush herself. She had dark, silky hair and large, long-lashed eyes. She looked at us with zero expression.

“There,” she said, indicating a dressing space with a limp finger. “Go to it.” And then she yawned. Clearly Blair had better things to be doing.

Then, “Heeeey, lady, you look GORGEOUS!” Blair’s voice boomed, all of a sudden becoming Little Miss Enthusiasm. “Wow, who did your makeup? You’re gonna look so good up there!”

It was Theresa Rose. She DID look gorgeous. She was already wearing a sleek black dress. Her long blond hair was piled on her head, and she had on dangly earrings so perfect that I could feel the toddler-urge to grab them from her ears and make them mine. TR saw us looking at her, and waved before turning to her bag to get ready. The clean lines of her back and shoulders shone golden.

I was not jealous for the following reasons:

1. Jealousy is an unbecoming emotion, and so I refused to experience it, and besides,

2. black formal dresses
(so
the default option! boring!) demonstrated a complete lack of creativity, whereas navy blue — well, now that’s adventure!

3. Jane Goodall, with her great, generous intellect, would never have been jealous of something so superficial and petty.

I turned to my own cubby to get ready. Missy Wheeler, her auburn hair now perfectly offset by the purple bodice of her dress, was using the cubby between Margo’s and mine. She was deeply immersed in mascara application beside me. She had a special technique that involved separating each lash with a safety pin. I, on the other hand, was a fluster of powders and lipstick. It had all looked perfect in the packaging, but somehow when I applied makeup, it never seemed to beautify as much as I hoped.

Missy frowned at herself in the mirror.

“Come on, Janice,” she said. “Wanna step outside and check our makeup? You can tell better in the natural light.” She grabbed a small mirror, and I followed her outside. “Hey.”

Missy and I turned. Jimmy Denton stood behind us in worn jeans and a T-shirt. He held a few papier-mâché flowers and birds in his arms.

“Hey, good luck, y’all. Good luck, Janice.”

He seemed nervous, almost apologetic. My tongue froze.

“Janice, uhh, I just wanted, uhh …”

He kicked a piece of string on the ground and trailed off. Total Awkwardness Olympics. Missy interrupted with her Teacher Voice.

“Thanks soooo much, Jimmy. Your decorations are amazing. Really cool. Janice was admiring them.”

He nodded and walked away. I looked at her, horrified.

“Did not,” I said to Missy. Using the tiny compact mirror, I started to apply the mascara I’d borrowed from my mom. I hoped to look doe-eyed like Susannah or like Audrey Hepburn or even mean, pretty-eyed Blair. My hands were still shaking, though.

“Did not what?” Missy asked.

“I did not admire his decorations. I can’t stand that guy.”

“Janice, here. Let me help you with that. I think your mascara might be, like, a hundred years old. Let’s use mine.”

I sighed and dropped the crusty mascara, then faced Missy, holding carefully still. She was good at makeup when it was called for, precise in her application. It soothed me to have someone touch my face gently. Missy studied my face in the sunlight, clicked her tongue approvingly, and then we headed back inside.

As soon as we returned, Blair appeared behind us again, her pretty face once more blank and cold.

“Don’t be disappointed if you don’t win,” she purred. “Not everyone’s really made for the pageant scene, and it’s the trying that counts.” She smiled wickedly. “Besides, the world needs women who can work in labs and offices without being a distraction.” She winked at us and walked away.

Missy’s face was blazing, and she fumbled with the makeup brushes. Strangely, Blair didn’t bother me at all.
Nerd of cool
, I thought. Blair, it occurred to me, was devastatingly boring. I felt bad for her.

But Blair had messed with Missy’s head all right. I spent the next fifteen minutes whispering reassurances to her. “Blair’s just a Sour Face,” I said. “Don’t worry about her — I mean, she’s TR’s
sister,”
and “You’ll never end up in some boring office. You’re VERY distracting.”

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
def.
Sour Face
: (n) a girl who always looks as if she’s experiencing a distinctly unpleasant bitter taste and maintains this dour facial expression regardless of what her actual emotions are. Such a girl is impossible to read.

There was no time to dwell on Blair’s baditude, though. It was time for the Miss Livermush Pageant to begin.